I have no kids myself, but I assume soccer/Association Rules Football must be popular as a middle-school and high-school sport, or we would not have the meme/phrase “soccer mom.” And it is the most popular team sport in the world – just not in the U.S., where it gets less attention than baseball, American football, basketball, ice hockey, even volleyball. I recall back in the '70s the Tampa Bay Rowdies were very popular, but the North American Soccer League folded in 1993. Every attempt to establish pro soccer here seems to fizzle. And college soccer, if there is any, seems to get less press than college lacrosse. Why is that?
Popular among tweens: Easy to play, very little equipment needed, low impact.
College: How do you define popularity? If you mean in terms of television viewership, there are plenty of college sports that many students engage in that get little to no television exposure.
Pros: Various debatable reasons. One factor is the lack of history and tradition among the various leagues that have existed (which is another problem in itself).
Personal WAG: Minus the cultural tradition, soccer(football) isn’t really that great of a spectator sport. The scoring frequency is too low to keep interest, and there’s way too much back-and-forth before a goal, so it’s difficult to tell who has the upper hand.
The NASL folded in 1984.
Soccer moms are generally mothers of younger children. Parents want their kids to get some safe exercise and social time. The majority are coached by a parent that knows nothing about the sport. IMO, it’s the extreme lack of sophistication in coaching and play that most people are exposed to that leads them away from the sport. Watching most sports, if you don’t know much about it, is boring.
Also, in America, there isn’t really a ton of money to be made in it. Kids see Lebron James making many millions of dollars and the average salary in MLS is something like $100k. Which do you think they’re going to concentrate on.
Soccer is fairly easy to play at younger ages, and doesn’t require as much natural talent as other sports. Once you reach about high school age, the kids without talent get cut from the team, and the kids with it can switch to a more popular traditional sport for the benefits, future scholarships, and popularity. When it comes time to make a choice between sports, chances are the gifted athletes stick with the more popular sports, regardless of their personal history.
I’ve moved this thread to the Game Room so some more sports fans can have a crack at it.
Personally, I think soccer isn’t high enough impact for a lot of U.S. sports fans - it’s too slow, too low scoring and it’s seen as a kids’ game.
- North American pro soccer is correctly viewed as being a minor league.
While the guys in the various North American leagues are certanly better soccer players than I am, they’re not playing in MLS, and didn’t play in the NASL and all those leagues, because they were the best in the world. The best players in the world play in the European leagues, especially the English Premiership.
To be honest, I think it’s impressive that the current soccer league, MLS, draws as well as it does when it’s a second-rate league. The Toronto franchise is packing them in. I don’t know where all these people are coming from - I’ve never heard anyone talking about them, and they’re a back page story in every paper’s sports section - but they sell out. Admittedly, it’s a small stadium, but they’re sold out for some time to come.
- Soccer doesn’t fill any particular marketing niche.
North America already has significant professional team sports leagues playing every month of the year, and there’s only so many dollars to go around.
- Sports derive a lot of legitimacy from the perception of permanence and legitimacy, which soccer leagues haven’t lasted long enough to warrant.
Events like the Super Bowl, Stanley Cup and World Series draw viewers because they’ve been around a long time and the unspoken assumption is that those events are important in some way. A new league faces the trouble of convincing the customer base that their championship matters.
- It’s simply not culturally viewed here as being a sport you watch on TV.
I mean, why do Canadians love hockey? Why is football so popular in Texas? Why are Dominicans insane about baseball? Sometimes the answer is just that some things are popular and some aren’t, and soccer simply is not popular. There is no clear correlation between a sport’s participation rate and spectator success. NASCAR is very popular but very few people race cars.
The correct answer to the OP is that soccer is NOT popular among tweens and teens.
This does not contradict the fact that tons of tweens, and many teens, play the game.
Children play soccer because parents love to have their kids join soccer leagues. This does three things:
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Gets them out of the house two nights a week for practice and a Saturday game,
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Involves them in a sport where they all will participate fairly equally (as opposed to, say, baseball, where as the ages increase, the less-athletic tend to end up in right field or on the bench), and
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Allows the parents to feel good about having little Johnny and Jamie involved in athletic endeavors without having to worry much about the quality of the play they manage, because the version of soccer played on most American fields bears so little resemblance to actual association football that it is a wonder the rest of the world allows the name to be used for our sport. :smack:
But what you see happen as they grow older is this:
A) The boys gravitate into American Football just as soon as they are able to, and
B) The girls head off to Volleyball, or cheerleading, or softball, or some other activity, or give up sports altogether.
The usual drop off point is the entry into Junior High. Under 12 divisions of recreational youth soccer leagues usually have a fairly strong participation rate (as a percentage of players who played either Under-6 or Under-8), but Under-14 divisions are almost always substantially smaller. But Under-16, the drop-off is so noticable that even recreational leagues end up having a travelling aspect at that age just to round up enough teams to have a season.
Soccer’s popularity among the tweens can best be summed up by the almost complete lack of interest that highly spendthrift age has in merchandising in America related to soccer. I suppose it isn’t surprising they haven’t got Christiano Ronaldo posters up in their rooms, but the lack of any soccer posters whatsoever, the lack of purchase of jerseys, of hats, of, well, ANYTHING relating to soccer, foreign or domestic, shows that the interests of tweens have long since moved on from kicking the ball up and down the field to the bloodthirsty screams of soccer parents.
Doug (proud coach, referee, and former soccer parent for over 18 years)
Eh, Beckenbauer, Muller, Cruijff, and Best all played in the NASL at a very high level. Depending on who you ask probably 3 or 4 of those would be among the 10-20 best players of all time. Talent was pretty concentrated on a few teams though.
In the MLS, you’re much more correct although Roberto Donadoni played in MLS and then went and played in the European championship for Italy. There have been a couple other world class players that have gone through the league, but yeah, it’s generally second rate.
Also, one of the main reasons the major pro sports are so popular and get more coverage in the media is because of gambling. Of course you could gamble on soccer, but most of the action is on other sports.
The popularity of fantasy leagues also adds to the coverage of the major sports.
I’m sure someone has the exact figures, but I’m sure the NFL, college football, and college basketball (especially the NCAA tournament) draw the most gambling money.
Maybe soccer is just more fun to play than to watch.
Soccer is great for young kids because it’s totally non-stressful and non-embarrassing even if you suck at sports. Baseball is horrible for the same reasons–you have to come to bat and everybody watches you, and it’s even worse if the ball gets hit to you in the field. Football is hopeless if you’re not big, and basketball sucks if you’re short and slow. But soccer . . . everybody gets to run and flail at the ball, and nobody watches any one person for very long.
That’s the reason we have soccer moms. It never has, and never will, translate into adult spectator appeal–any more than volleyball at summer picnics translates into support for a pro volleyball league.
I’m not sure I buy this argument. MMA seems to have supplanted boxing despite being only a couple decades old. Plus the flagship league (UFC) almost went bankrupt earlier this decade, and is currently far and away more popular than boxing. And NASCAR was an unpopular fringe sport a couple decades ago, compared to today where its biggest events crush all other programs except the Superbowl, some (very few) NFL playoff games, and the biggest American Idol episodes.
It would seem that inertia is not the primary cause of a sports popularity or lack thereof. It seems to me that the traditional sports are at all-time popularity highs because of very hard and diligent work by those who run them.
Another point to consider…Soccer just isn’t very “TV-friendly”, at least for American television. There aren’t enough natural breaking points in the action to allow the network to sell advertising time, and cutting away from live action may cause the audience to miss a rare scoring play. They’ve done that screen border thingy…where a sponsor gets their logo superimposed along the edge of the TV screen, while the game is shown in a “window”…but that just ain’t the same as a traditional TV spot, and sponsors won’t pay as much (or as often) for that sorta thing with so many alternatives available.
Then there’s competition from more traditional sports with an exisisting fan base. Football is God during the season. Basketball, Baseball, NASCAR, even Hockey and Golf… at least one of those is pretty much always in season, with considerable overlap. That doesn’t really leave much in the way of an opportunity for soccer to develop its own following from the folks that watch whatever is in season, or hang out at sportsbars, etc.
Chuck Klosterman makes basically this same argument in Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, and I more or less agree with it. If you’re a kid with no confidence and no innate athletic ability, you can still join the soccer team and basically stand around on the field hoping that the ball never comes to you, and blindly kicking it forward and praying, or passing it over to a more capable teammate, if it does. It’s possible to play soccer and never really be put on the spot.
Of course, once you reach the college or pro level, or high school varsity, for that matter, the guys who aren’t capable get weeded out, and everyone on the team ideally will be a good player. But up until that point, it’s easy to just dawdle on the field and not really do anything.
The same could be said for NASCAR, substituting “spectacular accident” for “rare scoring play.”
Again, NASCAR no doubt faced the same uphill battle even a decade ago. What hole in the schedule did they fill? None; they muscled their way in. Made even more impressive because NASCAR is one of the few sports to take on the NFL directly on Sunday afternoons.
Another newcomer sport that seems to have caught on despite not being steeped in tradition is the X-Games.
MMA and auto racing are individual events. One person wins. Soccer is a team sport. Everyone has a favorite football player, but above all as a fan you identify with a team.
I wouldn’t say the X Games have necessarily caught on outside of the 12-24 age range, though I do know who Shaun White is (the fact of which annoys me to no end).
NASCAR proves my point, though; it took a long time for NASCAR to earn its popularity.
As to MMA - which, let’s be honest, is still a niche sport that doesn’t get much time in the sports pages - its eclipsing of boxing was facilitates by the fact that professional boxing completely screwed itself up BEFORE MMA was a going concern. There are what, four boxing associations now, or is it 5?
But hasn’t soccer been around in the US as long or longer than NASCAR? How much time do we give it before we can pronounce it unappealing to Americans?